CFB Fantasy — Week Recap
Commissioner’s Notes
Intro
Week 1 is in the books and it was a shootout. We had two players break the previous record for points in a week and everyone was very high. Between the 6 of us, we only had technically 5 losses (4 unique games) and 5 passes, meaning an average of +36.2 points per game including the losses. It was a bad week for college football but a good week for this.
Choke Job of the Week
I had planned to do a choke job of the week but it’s hard picking between the finalists this week. The obvious choices are Michigan needing and getting the refs to bail them out against Western Michigan, and Rutgers getting embarrassed by UMass. I think I’m going to have to go with Rutgers simply because of the massive point spread differential (30 point favorites to lose 16, and it wasn’t nearly as close as the final score indicated). UMass has been the worst program in FBS by nearly every objective measure and hadn’t won a game against an FBS opponent since October 12, 2023. And it’s strange, Rutgers has such a good coach that Tennessee fans should have accepted that they can’t do better.
At the same time, it’s hard to understate how awful it was for Michigan to need the refs to bail them out against Western Michigan. Given the spread (-26.5), the right and truthful score should have had them missing the spread by 32.5. Not nearly as bad as Rutgers, obviously, but any time you’re losing by 5 touchdowns to the spread, you know it’s a major disaster. And them getting an extra play on the end was criminal. But it’s the school who in the 2013 Outback Bowl had the refs signal a first down when there was a clear gap before the marker, so we’re used to seeing baffling calls for them.
Honorable mentions go to Clemson, who got dogwalked by LSU, and Western Kentucky, who got blown out by Nevada. Even as 10 point underdogs Clemson found a away to embarrass themselves further by losing by 41 and that’s even without the NFL players that Kiffin brought back. Clemson’s time really has passed them by. And yes, I see you Western Kentucky. With all the shenanigans going on at the top among the power programs, it’s easy to miss a 4 point favorite going and getting blown out by 35. They were one of the few C-USA teams with a chance to win an FBS game and as such were played in both pods, giving -35 to Bob and Dylan and setting an already high bar for biggest loss played of the season.
CFB Game Summary
In our game, we ended up with pretty close matchups. The pod-vs-pod match was 122 points (8% of the winning pod’s score) but the player-vs-player matchup didn’t pit 1v1 and 2v2, so the per-matchup differential was nearly as great (106.7 per game). In a very close finish, Bob finished a single point ahead of Dylan for 4th, getting an extra match point, while Bruce and Jacob spent the whole weekend behind but had backloaded schedules and stormed to #2 and #3 overall.
It’s hard to make heads or tails of anything in week 1, especially this week 1, since it largely came down to schedule arrangement. As we move deeper into the season we’ll get a better sense of how good each player’s roster is.
Changes this week
There were no major changes to how things work this week, but I did make a couple small quality of life improvements. There was a small bug where the live status scorecards didn’t correctly tell you the number of remaining games and marked completed games as still pending; this is now fixed and you should see a count of how many live games you have when games are going, and a correct count of how many pending games you have when they aren’t. I’ve also added a feature to hyperlink each live game to the ESPN Gamecast page for it, so if you see a score on your scorecard and want to check in on it, that score is a hyperlink to see more.
Drop/Adds
We had the following roster changes this week:
White Pod: Bob drop Arkansas State, pick up UConn
Orange Pod: Zach drop Arkansas State, pick up Louisiana Tech.
Recap Explanation
Since this is the first week of the season, I want to lay out what the information is that I’ll be providing in these recaps if any of it is unclear.
1. Pod vs pod table and overall results – here I’ll list the high-level summary of players and pods; who scored the most, who got the match play points, etc. You’ll see two “synthetic” players in the table. These are the best theoretical lineups with the leftover free agents in each pod (the scraps, hence player name “Scrappy”). These have no significance to the game and are only there as an amusement. It’s very rare to see Scrappy beat anybody, much less finish 2nd overall, which really highlights just how awful this week was – there were blowouts in the overwhelming majority of games this week.
2. Week’s matchups – just shows who was matched up in the PVP format. This is on a double round robin so this week’s matchups will be repeated in week 6. For the upcoming week 2, our matchups are Bob v Jacob, Dylan v Zach, and Bruce v Dan.
3. Season leaderboard – this will be the running tally of all three methods (match play, total points, and PVP) but of course on week 1, it’s the same as the weekly.
4. Player detail – this box lists your final scorecard, the scores for teams you didn’t play, and an optimal lineup showing what arrangement of all your teams would have given you the highest score, marked red where there were misplays. As you can see from the collapsed details, my actual score was higher than 4 players’ optimal and only 5 points lower than Bruce’s optimal, so don’t feel bad about losing to me.
5. Max Lineup – this is the best possible lineup among all CFB teams, which again shows how terrible this week was. You could fill out a lineup, including multiple G6 conferences that are on the receiving end of buy games, with teams that averaged winning by 58 ppg.
6. Unplayed Games
6A. Redundant games – this section is the highest scoring games that it wouldn’t make sense to play them; putting any of these teams in play would have meant removing a team that scored more points. Only 3 games here (Memphis, Washington, and Houston) seemed very helpful, so we didn’t have a lot of points “stuck” behind better games.
6B. Wasted games – this section is the more informative because it shows where the biggest misplays (which are only that retroactively, of course) can be found. The fact that I put 5-point loser/1-point “winner” Michigan in my wild card makes this look absurd for me – I had 3 30+ point favorites that sat on my bench. Hopefully, that doesn’t come back to bite me later in the season. These games are ranked by net points gained, so the ranking isn’t their raw margin of victory but the most points a player could get by swapping them in.
7. Top unowned scores – this lists the top performers for the week that weren’t owned in one or both pods. These would have been ideal drop/add candidates, but for this week I don’t think any of them were big enough favorites to win to justify the risk.
8. Games by pod and ownership – in this section, I wanted to break down all the games that were played by looking at games played in both pods, games owned in both pods but only played in one, and games only played in one where the team was a free agent in the other. At the end of this section I put a spot for head-to-head games – often there’s a game where it’s a very close spread and one person just wants to take a chance on it. In this case, Jacob was thin in the MWC and took Nevada, a slight underdog, whereas Bob and Dylan both went with the favorite Western Kentucky, thus giving Jacob a net 70 point gain on both of them, which turned out to be huge when his final margin over them was +15 and +16.
9. Pod similarity – here I did two measures of similarity between players. First, a flat matchup of everyone in white pod vs everyone in orange pod, to see which players had the most mutual picks. For this, Bruce and I matched on nearly half our picks, and those picks contributed a combined 338 points, so that was a pretty healthy core of obvious picks for both of us. There is another presentation of this similarity ordered by points rather than number of picks. I have the top two in this measure, representing 11/16 picks and 532/676 (78.7%) points, so my success clearly wasn’t any super genius insight but rather having the best week 1 alignment. The second measure of alignment is taking all 6 players and measuring pairwise how alike their scorecards were at every slot – basically the absolute value of the difference between their points at every conference slot and flex spot. This shows players whose team skeletons are similar, even if they’re not the same teams.
Pod vs. Pod —
Overall Results
This Week’s Matchups
| Player | Pts | Pts | Player |
|---|
Season Leaderboard
| Rk | Player | Match Pts | Total Pts | PVP Record |
|---|
Player Detail
Max — Best Possible Lineup, Any FBS Team
Unplayed Games
Redundant — scored on the bench, but no slot could use them
| Team | Conf | Net | Owner | Pod |
|---|
Wasted — a bench team that could have been swapped in
| Team | Conf | Pts Gained | Instead Of | Owner | Pod |
|---|
Top Unowned Scores (League-Wide)
| Team | Conf | Net | Free Agent In |
|---|
Games by Pod & Ownership
Pick Similarity
Cross-Pod — Same Teams Picked
Which teams two players both picked this week, regardless of the slot each used. Same-pod players can’t share a team.
Ranked by matching teams
| Pair | Matching | Shared Impact | Shared Teams |
|---|
Ranked by shared impact (Σ |margin|)
| Pair | Shared Impact | Matching | Shared Teams |
|---|
Every Pair — Points Per Slot
Slot for slot, how close were the points? Conference slots pair by conference; the flex slots pair best-to-best by margin. Lower distance = more alike. Same-direction slots are where both picks won, both lost, or both hit zero.
| Pair | Slot Pt Distance | Same-Direction Slots |
|---|
